


Their Gnashing Teeth and Criminal Tongues

by vargrimar



Series: The Chambers and the Valves [7]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Autistic Sherlock Holmes, Banter, Canon Compliant, Episode: s03e01 The Empty Hearse, Falling In Love, Jealousy, John's unconscious for all of this, M/M, Mary isn't a villain here, Missing Scene, Pining, Pre-Relationship, Season/Series 03, Sensory Headaches, bonding over a mututal love interest being incapacitated, say hello John! or don't, sherlock voice: amazing how fire exposes our priorities
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-21
Updated: 2020-02-21
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:27:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22824040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vargrimar/pseuds/vargrimar
Summary: The initial crush of adrenaline has been long since spent, but his body still thrums; he can still feel the dizzying clout of it, the heightened awareness of a heavy heartbeat trapped in a percussive rapid-fire between two lungs.John is alive.
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Series: The Chambers and the Valves [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1640680
Comments: 1
Kudos: 42





	Their Gnashing Teeth and Criminal Tongues

**Author's Note:**

> ( ‘cause these words are knives  
> and often leave scars )

Sherlock can still feel the fire against his face.

The Fawkes pyre has been doused and the onlooking crowd has dispersed, but the blaze still lingers. Its residual heat seeps through his skin cells, its smoke sticking to the lining of his lungs. His black leather gloves bear a light char, proof of the flames that had barred his path not fifteen minutes ago, and he can still feel the sheer heat of them licking at his palms, his fingers, suffocating in their strength.

Even if he hadn’t had the gloves, it wouldn’t have changed a thing. If it meant keeping John safe, he would have dived in with bare hands.

Sherlock tugs off a singed glove and sucks in a sobering breath as he sticks it in his coat pocket. The November evening’s air is crisp and cool; the pungent scent of woodsmoke twines with every inhale. Harsh lights from the nearby ambulance flash in his periphery and a part of him wants to walk further down the stretch of pavement so that he might glimpse its patient, but a dull throb lurks behind his temples and each sense is twisted a bit too tightly amongst the others, this slow yet ratcheting pull that makes blinking feel like a chore, and so Sherlock remains where he is, silent and alone and pressed up against the black iron fence.

This could have been worse, he thinks, pocketing his other glove. This could have been far, far worse. The cuts and bruises and smoke inhalation had been bad enough, yes, but it could have been so much worse.

The image of John glides into his mind’s eye, dazed and supine with dark whips of blood strewn in a Jackson Pollock masterpiece across his hairline. He’d been half-conscious in the grass, barely coherent, his eyes unfocussed and cast to the evening sky. Sherlock knelt over him in the moment, the palm of a singed glove brought against his flushed cheek in an attempt to assess the damage, and it was that glassy look, he thinks, that horrible look that was muddled and unaware and so very far away that made the whole of him clench with bright, unbridled panic.

That lingers, too. The panic. It’s less now than it was when he’d appropriated a stranger’s motorbike and floored it across central London with Mary at his back, but it lingers right there along with the fire, a vaguely electric undercurrent that sparks and sparks and _sparks_.

And perhaps that says more about his predicament than he would care to admit—that his reaction this evening was just as intense and visceral as it had been that night at the pool. It has been over two years since Sherlock stood on the damp tile beside the gently lapping water of Carl’s grave, and yet it’s as if no time has passed at all. The initial crush of adrenaline has been long since spent, but his body still thrums; he can still feel the dizzying clout of it, the heightened awareness of a heavy heartbeat trapped in a percussive rapid-fire between two lungs.

John is alive. A little worse for wear, but still here, still breathing, still healthy and hale. He is alive, _alive_ , safe, and that’s all that matters. Sherlock won’t (can’t) think about the alternatives because they didn’t happen and John is all right. Even if 999 hadn’t been called by one of the alarmed onlookers, he still would have been all right. Mary would have seen to him immediately and, if necessary, she would have rushed him to the nearest A&E. And if for some reason she couldn’t have done, Sherlock would have hauled John over his shoulder and rushed him there himself.

That is what the non-negotiable would have demanded, after all. John Watson, alive, regardless of any cost or personal danger, gloves or no gloves.

And the relief of John Watson being alive, Sherlock finds, surpasses even the lingering panic. It’s the way the tension drains out of him drop by drop, a slow and gradual easing that begins below his sternum and trickles out toward his wrists, his hands, the soles of his feet. It doesn’t banish the inner coils of twisting tumult or assuage the clear cadence of _amazing how fire exposes our priorities_ echoing in the back of his mind, but it helps just enough.

Movement sketches along the open space somewhere to his right. The sound of shoes coming down on cold pavement approaches with a determined gait, and from the dashes of pink and white approaching the very edge of his vision, Sherlock does not need to look to know it’s Mary.

His insides corkscrew together in a most unpleasant way.

“All right?” she asks, coming to a stop at his side.

He finds the strength to nod. “How’s John?”

“He’s good. Better. No serious injuries. They’ve got him on oxygen. Thankfully the smoke wasn’t too severe. We got to him just in time.”

“Will they take him to hospital?”

“Shortly, yeah. They want to keep the oxygen going for a bit, take a look at his head.” Mary offers a reassuring smile. “Don’t you worry. I’ll get him home.”

“I know you will,” he says, mirroring the smile, the demeanour. “You’re a nurse. I’ve no doubt he’s in good hands.”

“How did you know I was a nurse?”

“Taking both your perfunctory line of questioning regarding John’s injuries and his propensity for workplace romances into account,” he says, with perhaps too much emphasis on _propensity_ , “it was rather obvious.”

Delight captures Mary’s soft countenance. “Oh, he didn’t embellish a single thing, did he? You really can read someone just from looking at them.”

“I can do much more than that,” he says.

“I certainly believe it.” A glimmer of mischief. “What else can you see? Come on. Just right quick. I’m curious.”

Sherlock can feel the venom rise. He can feel the venom, the bile, the envy, a roiling causticity tangled in the very pit of him, and it’s a terrible sort of familiar.

Before (and he still must get used to that, the before; there is a Before and a Now and God, that _hurts_ ), it surged and ebbed like water, like the moon courting the tides. It flared when others tried to monopolise the attention of one army doctor who did not belong to them, and he would always let it, let it smoulder and seethe, his observations caught in the violent undertow of _you could never be worthy of him_ , _not in one year_ , _not in ten years_ , _not in a century_ , _not ever_.

It smoulders and seethes now, gathering down at the bottom of his throat. It tells him to be ruthless. It tells him to be scathing. It tells him to be beyond truthful, beyond honest, to hold nothing back. It tells him to cut her down to size because she is here and she is John’s and that is unacceptable, that is _wrong_. It howls that this can’t be permanent, it can’t, that the whole world has tipped off its bloody axis, that all of London has gone to hell in his two year absence; it howls because the possibility is there, pressed between her quick mind and clever thinking and the wryness of her wit: she, Mary Morstan, _worthy_.

Sherlock swallows down the venom and the bile. The envy remains, hackles raised, circling like a predator prowling amongst the brush, primed and ready to go for the throat, but he reins it back by the neck and forces it into a muzzle because such a feeling is completely useless and not at all what the current situation requires.

Mary is the reason John is alive, he thinks. If she hadn’t sought Sherlock out, if she hadn’t understood the texts, if she hadn’t _been_ there, John would have died. That is the truth: without Mary, Sherlock never would have known, and John would have been burnt with the kindling, a desiccated corpse left to chance discovery come morning’s light.

John is alive because of Mary, and Sherlock is nothing short of grateful.

“You bake in your spare time,” he says, making a show of assessing her from head to toe. “You do it often, mostly on the weekends, though not quite as often as you’d like. You’re very fond of cats, but the lack of hair on your clothes says you haven’t got any presently; John prefers dogs and neither of you have come to an accord. You squint a bit when you’re trying to see far off, so you’re short-sighted, yet you don’t wear glasses—you refuse to get them because you’d rather not have anything on your face.

“You’re also an only child,” he continues, purposefully omitting how she thinks glasses would be unflattering and she doesn’t want to look her age, “and not very inclined toward close friendships. That makes workplace interactions easier, not harder, because they’re casual and in a controlled environment, so all the idle small talk about the weather is actually appreciated. In the vein of work, you’re a nurse, as we’ve already established, though you’re not entirely satisfied with your part time employment. The hours, perhaps. Could also be the particular surgery. Petty office politics and all that. You still go above and beyond for your patients, though, the hallmark of any good nurse, but it’s more than that, isn’t it? You put yourself into it for a reason. Maybe you’re overly empathetic and feel personally responsible for their ills; maybe something particularly difficult happened in your past and you’re compensating for it now by taking care of others. Could be either. Hard to tell in this light.”

Beside him, Mary’s mouth drops open. Her eyes, a fine and watery grey, have widened considerably.

“That was amazing,” she says. And the way she says it—a little breathless, yes, like he’s just stolen the wind right from her lungs—reminds him of how John once looked, of how he’d sat beside him in the back of a cab and said, _That was amazing_ in that casual tone of quiet awe.

Sherlock resists the urge to preen.

“It really was,” she says, and she grins, practically beaming in the cold autumn air; it’s a compact composite of adrenaline and amusement and _thank God_ , _John’s okay_. “That was… amazing. Absolutely amazing. God, I can’t believe it. John told me all about it, of course he did, but that—oh, that was nothing like I expected.”

“And what did you expect?” he asks.

“Well, I don’t know, really,” she says. “It’s one thing to hear about it, but experiencing it firsthand—it’s sort of different, isn’t it? Not every day you get all your little habits listed off for you by your fiancé’s resurrected flatmate.”

“Did I get anything wrong?”

A slight furrow forms in Mary’s brow. “Sorry?”

“You said I listed off all your little habits,” he says. “Did I get anything wrong? There’s always some minute detail or slight misinterpretation. With John, it was the sister.”

Something snaps through her expression—something Sherlock can’t quite pin. It sweeps in and scarpers too quickly for him to parse.

“Spot on, actually,” says Mary, and another grin follows it, crinkling at the sides of her eyes. “No brothers or sisters here. Only child, me. Orphan, in fact; Mum and Dad passed away when I was young. That’s why I got into nursing, so I suppose the ‘difficult past’ bit isn’t too off the mark. I haven’t got many friends, either. Not close ones, anyway. Never been that sort. It’s a bit easier when it’s animals. I’m short-sighted, too. Contacts.” She gives an indicative tap below one eye. “Oh, and I do bake! Don’t know how on earth you got that one. I’ve only got time for it on the weekends because of the surgery, but every now and then I’ll have a bit of a lull mid-week. I bake my own bread, mostly, but I’ve done biscuits and small cakes before as well.”

“Do you do gingernuts?” he asks.

“I might do, yeah.” Mary appraises him with interest. “Is the great Sherlock Holmes telling me he prefers gingernut biscuits to all other biscuits?”

Unbidden, a faint smile finds its way to Sherlock’s face. “He might be. All other biscuits are, quite frankly, lesser. I should think even an amateur baker would know that. Common knowledge.”

“Well, I’m no Mary Berry, but maybe a batch or two will pop on over to your flat Sunday afternoon.” She winks. “Purely coincidental to all this, of course.”

“Yes, of course,” he says. “Purely coincidental.”

Mary then turns her attention back toward the ambulance. Out of the corner of his right eye, Sherlock can see the uniformed paramedics shuffling round the back of the vehicle. He knows John is there somewhere amongst them, squirreled away between panels of neon yellow and chequered green. He doesn’t dare look. He can’t.

“Thank you for finding him, Sherlock.” Her mouth has thinned, all humour forgotten. One hand clutches the strap of her handbag, knuckle-white. “I don’t know what I would have done.”

 _If John had died_ remains blessedly unsaid.

“You don’t need to thank me,” he says, because despite whatever differences have established the ravine between himself and Mary, this is something that bridges it. This is something he understands with his entirety, right down to the very marrow of his bones. This is something the both of them share: the desire to have John safe and protected, to have him whole and healthy and free.

“No, I do. I really do. It needs to be said.” She glances back to him. “That was amazing, too, you know. What you did to find him. What you did to get us here. If you hadn’t… If things had gone differently—”

“I know,” says Sherlock. And he means it.

Biting her lip, Mary gives a curt nod. “Yeah.”

Traffic’s familiar monotone nestles into the vacant air between them. The lights continue to flash in the distance, the wind carrying the tarrying scent of charred wood on its wings. Mary does not look at him; instead, her gaze darts to the pavement, the fence, the ambulance, mimicking the flighty and anxious skips of a hummingbird, but he can still feel the weight of it upon him, the weight of her presence radiating so very close to his, and it feels—too much.

Sherlock pulls measured breaths and wills the headache tangled between his temples to dissipate. He rubs a thumb and forefinger together, waiting, and watches as each exhale emerges in a long column of pale vapour.

A cigarette, he thinks idly. Could really do with a cigarette. A cigarette would be lovely.

“Right,” says Mary, adjusting one end of her long pink scarf. “Well, I suppose I ought to check in before they’re off. See how he is. I expect he’ll want to head straight home afterward. I’ll have to pop by and get the car. Need a lift to Baker Street? Could share a cab, if you like.”

“I’ll get my own,” he says. “Won’t be going back straightaway. I’ve got some other things to look into.”

“Will you come round and see him after?”

“I’ll wait, I think.”

“Really? You’re sure?”

“Very sure.” Sherlock affords her a wan smile. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not have to deal with another bloody nose.”

Mary grits her teeth in a sympathetic grimace. “Ooh, yeah, that’s right. Got you pretty good, didn’t he?”

“He did, indeed. It was quite the hit. I should have expected as much. John always did know how to use his head.”

She laughs. “That’s definitely one way of putting it. All better, then?”

“All better. Some lingering soreness, of course, but nothing I haven’t handled before.” It’s not technically a lie.

For a fleeting moment, something in Mary’s expression shifts. He catches the very end of it, the final flicker, infinitesimal, that treats at the corner of her mouth and narrows her eyes, but before he can ascribe any sort of meaning to it, her features relax into the familiar set of soft, tired relief.

“Good night, Sherlock,” she says quietly. “Take care going home, will you?”

“Will do,” he replies. _Take care of John_. “Good night, Mary.”

With an amiable smile, she turns and begins to make her way back toward the ambulance. 

As Sherlock watches her leave, the envy thrashes and snarls from back behind its confines. There is no threat to face, no competition to have, no arguments to make, and yet its howls possess a plaintive and yearning edge as if it somehow expects him to surge forward and make a claim.

A claim to _what_? he wants to shout. A claim to John? Why? What does that even mean? There is nothing to be done here, he tells it, but it does not listen because _this_ , this ridiculous feeling that has coiled up into some astringent and festering clot, somehow feels like _abandonment_ —and isn’t that odd? he thinks, because John was not the one who abandoned anybody at all.

It was him. He’s the one who did the abandoning. He’s the one who pitched himself off a roof. He’s the one who left John to an empty Baker Street, shaken and alone, heavy with the guilt of witnessing his flatmate’s suicide.

And Sherlock would do it again. If it meant keeping John safe, he would do it again and again and again. He would jump from a hundred rooftops, suffer a thousand Serbian prisons. He would do anything for John.

Mary is several metres down the pavement before she pauses. She turns back on her heel in a hesitant, almost considering manner. Her eyes drift to him in the pale yellow pall of the lanterns, incongruous shadows reclining in the rounded slopes of her face, and he can see the deliberation there, the indecision.

It’s a little strange, this particular moment, though he can’t quite determine why.

“He shaved because of you, you know,” she says.

Sherlock’s stomach lurches. “He what?”

“The moustache.” Mary swipes a finger over her upper lip. A smile accompanies the gesture, wry yet gentle. “He shaved it ‘cause of you. He said, ‘I don’t shave for Sherlock Holmes,’ but apparently he does. Certainly wasn’t for me, I’ll tell you that. I suffered that fuzzy monstrosity for _months_.”

He can’t stop the snicker. “Quite the saint.”

“Oh, I don’t know about saint,” says Mary. “I’ve thought about shaving it in his sleep more times than I can count. Almost did once or twice. Not very saintly behaviour, that. I’m glad it’s gone, though. God, am I ever. Thing was bloody awful.”

“Calling it ‘awful’ is being kind,” he says.

“It is, isn’t it?”

“It really is.”

“Well, if I was to call it something like ‘abhorrent’ or ‘hideous’,” she says, letting her voice drop into a conspiratorial whisper, “could I trust you to be discreet?”

“Oh, I’m always discreet,” he assures. “John wouldn’t hear it from me.”

“I’ll hold you to that,” she says.

“I would expect nothing less.”

And this, thinks Sherlock, is what John sees. John sees a charmingly clever woman with a fair face and a predilection for snarky humour underscored by tangible affection, and despite the baser parts of Sherlock that feel otherwise, despite the clamour that crams itself into his open circle of ribs until it pushes out at every possible angle, he knows that isn’t unreasonable—because he can see it, too.

With a nod, Mary’s eyes lift to the church behind him. “Suppose we ought to count our blessings, yeah? That we’ve got anyone at all to keep it from.”

Sherlock peers over his shoulder. Saint James the Less looms beyond the black iron bars, tall and imposing, its red-brown brick no longer licked orange in a blaze of bright firelight. Instead, the lanterns left behind cast it in a pale incandescence, one reminiscent of a low burning candle, its wick blackened and drowning amongst a pool of liquid wax.

His headache throbs with the ambulance lights. Scrubbing thumb and forefinger together in the safety of his coat pocket beside his singed gloves, he tamps down the recalcitrant beast of envy gnashing its teeth against his sternum.

“Yes,” he says. “Yes, I suppose we ought.”


End file.
